Dark Energy & the Aussie Poet

Dark Energy is expanding at an alarming rate, threatening our very universe.

And you thought all you had to worry about is getting studded tires on your car.

What exactly is dark energy? you ask.

Good question.

Terry Gross asked the same thing  of  Saul Perlmutter on her show the other night. Perlmutter is a Nobel Prize recipient.

You really have to hand it to Terry Gross. It’s not easy interviewing an astrophysicist. Most common folks only think of the universe in terms of the Big Dipper.

Perlmutter has discovered that dark energy is expanding faster and faster, like a cancerous mass left unchecked.

In fact, Dark Energy makes up most of the universe, says Perlmutter.

There is no such thing as empty space, it seems.

Space is an entity of its own.

And Dark Energy is making space reproduce itself faster and faster, Perlmutter says.

Astrophysicists like Perlmutter are trying to determine exactly what Dark Energy is, and why it is taking over our universe, like some ominous Creeper.

I’ll leave it to them to do that.

But what intrigues me is this notion that there is a darkness growing all around us, expanding at a terrifying rate.

I’m reminded of that old Christian classic — This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti.

Maybe Dark Energy has a spiritual element.

Maybe that’s the mystery of it.

Perhaps it’s as Bush poet Chris Wharton says in his 1996 ballad on Quantum Theology.

Snicker, snicker, snack.

God is a poet after all.

And if Peretti is right, the prayers of Believers can abate the darkness that threatens to overtake us.